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My name is Mary-Paige David and I am a high school Spanish teacher in a small rural district outside of Richmond, VA.

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-I work for a small rural school system east of Richmond, Va. There are about 2,600 students in the county and only one middle school and high school.
- About 70 percent of the students are white, with students of color making up less than half of this population. There is also only a small percentage of ELLs in my district.
-Almost half of our students though come from low income families.

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- While my school district is small and there is not a high population of culturally and linguistically diverse learners, there is still careful consideration when it comes to identifying CLDE.
- CLD who are suspected of a disability are given a series of tests that account for language and cultural bias and are given in their L1 when appropriate.
- To my knowledge though there is not specific framework for teaching CLDE, besides what I would assume being a collaborative process between the student's case manager (if they have an IEP) and the ESL teacher.

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-Culture has an impact on both how students learn and in the way teachers teach.
-Every student comes into a classroom with a differently cultural background that can impact how they learn. Each culture has its own set of expectations, ways of expression, or language, that might be different from others that can have an impact on the classroom.
-As a teacher it is important to be aware of your own culture, biases, or prejudices and how that make impact your teaching.
-By being aware of these factors, it will allow you to look at the students you teach through the correct lens.
-This means being a culturally responsive teacher and working to grow and better understand how to reach all students of different cultural backgrounds and help with their learning.

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-I am currently evolving in my journey to responsiveness. When I first thought about this question, I believe I had a genuine understanding of what it meant to be culturally responsive and it is something I felt I handled well in my own classroom. As I continued to read through the first chapter of Hollie, I realized how much I was not aware of how I need to continue to grow in this area.
- I mostly recently had a courageous conversation this school year with one of my upper level Spanish classes. It started with one white student wondering what the difference between being Hispanic and Latino was. I am a white college- educated woman teaching a language whose culture I did not grow up in. When answering this question I made it clear that my response is biased by my cultural background and it may not be a perspective shared by other students in the class who grew up speaking Spanish or in this culture.
-This allowed us to have an open and clear conversation about the ways language impacts culture and how it can be different for everyone.

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-As a teacher I work to make sure each and everyone of my students is able to see themselves in the content that I teach.
-This means providing students with materials that reflect the population that I teach and including marginalized language and cultures in these materials.
-For my students who speak a second language or grew up speaking Spanish, I work to validate their linguistic behaviors, as reassure them that there is no one way of speaking a language, and that my vocabulary and accent is different from theirs as it relates to my own educational background.

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-VABB stands for validating and affirming of one's language and culture with the intention of building and bridging the students to path of success in school/society.
-VABB is a different take on cultural and linguistic responsiveness that means meeting students where they are and guiding them and providing them what they need to be successful.
- I appreciated Hollie's take on what it means to be a culturally responsive and believe that it is a philosophy that I would subscribe too. He highlights all the ways a learner can be diverse and how you can explicitly and implicitly affirm a student's home culture or language.

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-To be a be a culturally responsive teacher means to work towards empowering students by meeting them where they are and affirming who they are the diversity they bring to your classroom. CRT is about knowing who you students are and what they are capable of. It means understanding the diverse needs and beliefs that students bring into the classroom and how to address them through instruction and curriculum

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-On page 38 of his book, Hollie highlights the rings of culture. What is most important to note about these rings is that while there are many personal different characteristics included, race is not one of them.
-At the beginning of the year as part of a unit on identity, I have my students complete an identify map that is similar to these rings. On their map the student highlights characteristics that make up who they are.
-By doing this, it allows me to see to better understand who this new group of students is, and as a teacher what can I do to support them in their education.